LHC Hits an Energy of 3.5TeV 149
Posted
by
kdawson
from the do-not-look-directly-into-beam-with-your-remaining-eye dept.
from the do-not-look-directly-into-beam-with-your-remaining-eye dept.
Inovaovao writes "As announced on Twitter by the CMS experiment, the LHC has finally accelerated both beams to 3.5 TeV for the first time. It thus broke the previous energy record of 1.18 TeV it had set last fall, about a month since operations started again this year. It'll be a while yet before we see stable beams and collisions at 3.5 TeV. You won't get much of a clue to the timetable by reading the General Manager's pompous announcements. If you want to follow what's going on, look at the Status Ops."
The press release is one week old (Score:5, Informative)
The press release you called 'pompous' is one week old -- when the record energy hadn't yet been reached. Apparently going to CERN's front page is too much effort for slashdot's editors. Anyway, here's the current press release [web.cern.ch]
Re:The press release is one week old (Score:5, Informative)
Also, IIRC the general director's first language isn't english, so I think the "pompous" the submitter saw was just stemming from that. From what I've heard, he's a nice guy.
Energetically Equivalent to... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Energetically Equivalent to... (Score:5, Informative)
Per particle.
The designed nominal total beam energy of the LHC is in the range of the kinetic energy of an aircraft carrier travelling at a significant speed.
They did have stable beams (Score:2, Informative)
It'll be a while yet before we see stable beams...
From the CMS e-commentary ."..the beams were extremely stable
during this period and had a very long lifetime."
Re:The press release is one week old (Score:2, Informative)
That's not pompous, that's just German thoughts translated into English ;).
You seem to have confused country and language. Those are Swiss thoughts translated into English.
(Most) Americans speak English (granted, a bastardized form thereof). But that does not make them Her Majesty's subjects ;)
Re:If both beams are 3.5 TeV (Score:5, Informative)
LHC physicist checking in - yes, that will make the collisions 7 TeV. Note that there are no collisions yet, we're still doing work to make sure that the beams are stable and focused properly. Once we have collisions, we'll run at this energy for about a year and a half before shutting down for a year to perform maintenance.
The LHC never produced 14 TeV collisions, the highest collision it will perform this year is 7 TeV. It is designed to produce 14 TeV collisions, and it will hopefully do that after we finish taking data at 7 TeV. It is true, however, that cosmic ray collisions completely kill the "LHC will destroy the world" bullshit.
Re:If both beams are 3.5 TeV (Score:1, Informative)
From their press release:
"The first attempt to collide beams at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) will follow on a date to be announced in the near future."
Source: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2010/PR05.10E.html
Re:If both beams are 3.5 TeV (Score:4, Informative)
If all that it true, doesn't it completely and totally kill the whole "LHC will destroy the world".
You are exactly right. And it’s the failure of every “expert” interviewed who didn’t mention this, and of course of the media hype machine, that that is not well known to everyone.
Oh, and of course mostly to the loonies who want to stay ignorant.
and that the most energetic cosmic rays are 10^8 TeV.
To imagine this: Those particles are so fast that they have the mass of an apple or orange. A subatomic particle! This gives you some feeling for the power.
And yes, that does mean that they create those tiny black holes all the time in our atmosphere.
If this would create black holes, earth would have never existed.
Re:Where did I leave my crowbar? (Score:1, Informative)
I'd think you meant Another World.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_%28video_game%29
It starts with an accelerator.
Re:How many Libraries of Congress (Score:5, Informative)
Of course the correct way to do it would be to multiply the information of the LoC with k*T ln 2 where k = Boltzmann constant, T = temperature of the Library, ln 2 to change from base 2 logarithm (information entropy) to natural logarithm (thermodynamic entropy).
Let's take the 20 million volumes * 200 pages from your calculation, and assume 250 words per page [google.com], 4.5 letters per word [trincoll.edu] and 1.4 bits per letter [garykessler.net] (see directly above table 1, the value for longer text; I've taken the middle, rounded up). With this data, we get a total information content of the LoC of 6.3*10^12 bits. Let's further assume the temperature of LoC is about 290K, then we get the energy equivalent of the LoC as about 0.11 TeV.
Therefore 3.5 TeV is about 32 LoC.
Re:luminosity (Score:3, Informative)